What Do You Remember?

Your brain is locked in silence and darkness inside your skull, and all it is trying to do is understand the structures of the world so it can operate in it better. Whenever it encounters a surprise, it writes that down and it makes changes to your circuitry.

But as you go through life and your brain develops better models of the world, less and le

We don’t retrieve a memory, we don’t replay the event; we reconstruct it on the fly, assembling a new picture, a fresh sensation each time. It’s unhelpful to think of these as flaws or bugs, because the very fact that memory comes to us freshly assembled is why we can use it to come up with new ideas. These additions, subtractions and rearrangement

IF WE BETTER UNDERSTOOD MEMORY AND IMAGINATION we might discover that memory is in part the way that persistent productive obsessions recombine instantly and that imagination is our repertoire of persistent productive obsessions dynamically recombining.

It is in the present moment that we begin to know ourselves. Joan Didion, a famous proponent of writing things down, began doing so at age five. She believed that notebooks were one of the best antidotes for a distracted world: “We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget w